Maker Studios Co-Founders Talk Their Journey From The Bedroom To The Boardroom

A few of the co-founders of YouTube Multi-Channel Network Maker Studios opened up about their journey from bedroom content creators to master collaborators backed by the Walt Disney Company.

The founding team (minus ousted CEO Danny Zappin) were backstage at their NewFront event before being cornered by AOL-owned Beet TV’s team for an interview. Though the interview was awkward at times, it provided an interesting insight into the attitudes of the people who founded the company, and their thoughts on going from the bedroom to the boardroom.

“We started this thing in a back yard, just five or six of us, five years ago, and we had no idea of the scale and the magnitude of where things would be,” Kassem G said. Adding: “Seeing all these people on the screen like Will.I.Am and James Franco. People who you would never normally get to meet and talk to, but they’re totally encouraged to come work with us. That’s very humbling as a video creator.”

“We just liked making videos. It wasn’t like ‘Let’s start this company so that we can sell to Disney one day…’ It was like ‘Let’s make videos together because it’s fun,” ShayCarl said, giving his take on the motivation behind building Maker Studios.

“We were all content creators and the idea was that if we could come together and share audiences and build an infrastructure, we could all scale and build a company to what it is today… We’re the only company in our space that was founded by talent. We’re always about empowering talent and content creators, and providing opportunity,” Ben Donovan added.

“That YouTube channel [The Station] that we started together was the fastest-growing YouTube channel at the time, and it just proved to us that if you can leverage each other’s audiences together and come together to do something bigger, and it was just a huge success,” Kassem G noted.